Experimental and numerical study of flapping wing rotary MAV

In this paper, investigation was made into the design, experimental study and numerical analysis of a novel design for flapping wing rotary micro aerial vehicles (FWR-MAV). This novel design is applied on the RotorBee project which is the world's first FWR-MAV to achieve vertical take-off and landing untethered. Attention was firstly focused on the overall design and experiment of RotorBee prototype. In the experiment, the aerodynamic force produced by the flapping wing rotor including the aerodynamic has been measured through the test system. Then a numerical model containing the complete two wing with bionic shape, simplified from RotorBee, is used to analysis the motion and aerodynamic properties. The geometry and motion parameters of the model are measured from practical aircraft. The comparison shows a very good agreement between the experimental and numerical results. Improvement of the design can be made by using this numerical method.